When I was a small child, I had an imaginary friend, as children do. His name was “Jack”. It was not an extraordinary childhood memory, even having Jack Ford (1957-2025) as a dearest of friends. The notion of ‘Jack’ is very Australian. Kangaroo Jack is a 2003 American buddy action comedy film directed by David McNally from a screenplay by Steve Bing and Scott Rosenberg. The novel My Brother Jack by George Johnston is about Australian as you can get. Jack Ford was a big brother for me, I who is the eldest in his family with a younger brother. The novel is Johnston’s semi-autobiographical novel, where the narrator, David Meredith, travels through his childhood and adolescence in interwar Melbourne, through to adulthood and his prominent career as a journalist during World War II, to his life on a Greek island in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a very apt looking at a generation which preceded that of Jack’s and I.
The word, “Jackness” arose on the day of his funeral in a comment about how we remembered Jack. Several of us in conversations agreed it was an apt word, including his widow. But what does it mean if you never knew Jack? In my A Eulogy for Jack, the word relates to when I stated:
In the Australian idiom, Jack was a character. He broke convention as “a man of the people” and yet “a hidden intellectual.” Jack did not write intellectual history as such but his military and local histories was full of well-connected ideas.
The characteristics of Jack and his cats were very similar. Jack was a ‘soft’ Australian bloke, one who easily changed with the times, an era of Women’s rights and respect. He was no fool in the myth of Australian masculinity. Jack also knew when he could relax with a good book, and yet he was quick to defend, aggressively, his territory: the integrity of good history and truthful story telling.
That is the historical ‘Jackness’ I would argue for. However, it is not a denial of other characteristics that persons saw in Jack. Each person can be a ‘man for all seasons’. Nevertheless, in the experience of Jackness there is undeniably a history and anthropological quality. In just a brief JSTOR search we find:
Hughes, R. (1939). The Art of Jack Lindsay. The Australian Quarterly, 11(1), 23–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/20630717
Riezler, K. (1939). Jack and Jill: Considerations of Some Basic Sociological Concepts. Social Research, 6(4), 489–501. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40981693
Corkery, D. (1945). Jack B. Yeats Once More. The Irish Monthly, 73(867), 363–367. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515420
Kirch, M. S. (1954). Note on the History of Jack the Giant Killer. Modern Language Notes, 69(1), 44–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/3039711
Benjamin, Peggy H. (1960). The Last of Captain Jack. Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 10(2), 22–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4516371
Jarrell, M. L. (1964). “Jack and the Dane”: Swift Traditions in Ireland. The Journal of American Folklore, 77(304), 99–117. https://doi.org/10.2307/537561
Walker, D. L. (1967). Jack London (1876-1916). American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, 1(1), 71–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27747566
Rogers, W. W., & Ward, R. D. (1972). “Jack Turnerism:” A Political Phenomenon of the Deep South. The Journal of Negro History, 57(4), 313–332. https://doi.org/10.2307/2716979
Webb, I. (1975). “What Culture is Appropriate To the Worker?”: Two English Working Class Novelists: Robert Tressell and Jack Common. The Radical Teacher, 1(1), 10–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20709023
Ward, S. (1983). Social Philosophy as Best-Seller: Jack London’s “The Sea-Wolf.” Western American Literature, 17(4), 321–332. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43020277
Birchard, R. S. (1987). Jack London and the Movies. Film History, 1(1), 15–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815037
Schmidt, N. J. (1989). Jack H. Driberg: A Humanistic Anthropologist before His Time. Anthropologica, 31(2), 179–194. https://doi.org/10.2307/25605541
Featherstone, S. (1991). Jack Hill’s Horse: Narrative Form and Oral History. Oral History, 19(2), 59–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179230
Reesman, J. C. (1997). “Never Travel Alone”: Naturalism, Jack London, and the White Silence. American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, 29(2), 33–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27746687
Hamilton, G. (1998). Reading Jack. English Education, 30(1), 24–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40173116
Szumsky, B. E. (1999). The House That Jack Built: Empire and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century British Versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Marvels & Tales, 13(1), 11–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41388520
Biester, J. (2001). Shaming the Fool: Jack and anti-Jack. English Literary Renaissance, 31(2), 230–239. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447618
Butler, J. (2004). Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History. The Journal of American History, 90(4), 1357–1378. https://doi.org/10.2307/3660356
Green, T. (2007). Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer: Two Arthurian Fairytales? Folklore, 118(2), 123–140. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035417
Baskind, S. (2011). Jack Levine (1915–2010): A Real Human Guy. American Art, 25(2), 120–123. https://doi.org/10.1086/661972
Barnstone, W. (2015). On the Road from Dante to Jack Kerouac (Stopping by Frost, Pound, and Eliot). Comparative Literature Studies, 52(2), 233–253. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.52.2.0233
McLeod, Jan. (2017). The House That Jack Built: DGMS Rupert Downes and Australian Army Medical Preparations for World War II. Health and History, 19(1), 80–101. https://doi.org/10.5401/healthhist.19.1.0080
Droge, A. (2017). “Always Called Jack”: A Brief History of the Transferable Skill. Victorian Periodicals Review, 50(1), 39–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26166543
Aird, M., Sassoon, J., & Trigger, D. (2021). ‘The White-man calls me Jack’: The many names and claims for Jackey Jackey of the lower Logan River, south-east Queensland, Australia. Aboriginal History, 45, 3–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48662581
The small selection of sources here provides the sufficient research, as we think on the nature of Jackness.
Neville Buch
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